Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [79]
I will keep the prayer book and hymnal in which this hymn is marked with a purple ribbon. Bound together in a single volume, these two books show the wear and tear of a thousand Sundays. A red ribbon marks the pages of the communion service, which have been handled so often that the corners are dark with fingerprints. The pages of the baptismal service are puckered from all the holy water that children have flung on them over the years, and the burial office too, from the rain that fell on them at the graveside service for a young mother. There is a yellow and red picture of a clown stuck in the pages of “Thanksgiving for a Child,” drawn for me by a girl named Harriett who signed her name in block letters so that I would not forget her, as I have not, though she must have children of her own by now.
This volume is so worn that I have long meant to replace it, but I have grown too fond of it to do that now. I like the cracked cover, with almost all of the gold rubbed off the cross. I like the crumpled pages, which show their age. The looks of this book tell the truth about where I have been. Although I do not spend nearly as much time in its pages anymore, I value the time I spent there, along with the people who prayed and sang these pages with me. When I need prayers wiser than my own, I can still find them in this book. When I need to sing what I feel instead of saying it, I can still find songs here that lift up my heart.
Like my prayer book and hymnal, my small leather-bound Bible is limp from long use. In thirty years, I have barely made a dent in it, although I have spent the better part of those years mining its treasures. If you look at it from the side, you can discover my favorite places to dig: Exodus, Job, and Hosea in the first testament; Mark, Luke, and Acts in the second. Like most Christians, I have my own canon, in which I hear God speaking most directly to me, but I also like the parts in which God sounds like an alien, since those parts remind me that God does not belong to me. I do not pretend to read the Bible any more objectively than those who wrote it for me. To read it literally strikes me as a terrible refusal of their literary gifts.
I will keep the Bible, which remains the Word of God for me, but always the Word as heard by generations of human beings as flawed as I. As beautifully as these witnesses write, their divine inspiration can never be separated from their ardent desires; their genuine wish to serve God cannot be divorced from their self-interest. That God should use such blemished creatures to communicate God’s reality so well makes the Bible its own kind of miracle, but I hope never to put the book ahead of the people whom the book calls me to love and serve.
I will keep the Bible as a field guide, which was never intended to be a substitute for the field. With the expert notes kept by those who have gone before me, I will keep hunting the Divine Presence in the world, helped as much by the notes they wrote in the margins while they were waiting for God to appear as by their astonished descriptions of what they saw when God did. I know that nine times out of ten, the truth scripture tells is the truth about the human search for God. Still, with the help of the guide, there is always the hope of glimpsing the bright dove that splits the sky, fluttering in full view before turning with a whirr and a cry to make its clean getaway.
IN HER BOOK on the art of personal narrative, Vivian Gornick says that it is everyone’s inclination “to make of his own disability a universal truth.”* I have tried not to do that, especially since I do not believe that it is possible to proclaim a universal truth about churches that remain so doggedly particular. Grace-Calvary is as rooted in rural north Georgia as the Appalachian Mountains are. When I travel to Boston, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles, I enter a religious landscape so different from my own that I need a translator in order to communicate.
I have